William Feller
Award Name : National Medal of Science
Year of Award : 1969
Award for : Mathematics
Location : Zagreb, Grad Zagreb, Croatia
William Feller was a Croatian-American mathematician specializing in probability theory. Feller was one of the greatest probabilists of the twentieth century, who is remembered for his championing of probability theory as a branch of mathematical analysis in Sweden and the United States. He was born on July 7, 1906 in Zagreb, Croatia. n the middle of the 20th century, probability theory was popular in France and Russia, while mathematical statistics was more popular in the United Kingdom and the United States, according to the Swedish statistician, Harald Cramér. His two-volume textbook on probability theory and its applications was called "the most successful treatise on probability ever written" by Gian-Carlo Rota. By stimulating his colleagues and students in Sweden and then in the United States, Feller helped establish research groups studying the analytic theory of probability. In his research, Feller contributed to the study of the relationship between Markov chains and differential equations, where his theory of generators of one-parameter semigroups of stochastic processes gave rise to the theory of "Feller operators". He received the National Medal Of Science in 1969.